A shriek is a many-splendoured thing

by Adam Jones (1993)

[Previously unpublished. This now stands as a melancholy monument to the stereo system in question,
which was stolen about a year later ... and I went back to a boom-box (not even my own!).]

Consummatum est. It is accomplished.

I have a decent stereo system for the first time in my thirty years on the planet. The sax solo in "Brown
Sugar" no longer sounds like a madman playing a kazoo.

It's been a long road to the summit. In my early years, I made do with a portable record-player that Dad
picked up for $20 at an auction. It came equipped with two knobs, tone and volume. One knob made the
music sound alternately shrill and leaden. The other summoned my parents from the living room and,
turned the other way, mollified them for a while.

It wasn't much, that stereo. The needle was well-worn to start with, and I never got around to replacing it
in ten years or so of obsessive groove-gouging. But set against the thrill of musical discovery, fidelity
faded into insignificance. The first LP I ever owned, Led Zeppelin IV, was passed on to me in such
awesomely poor condition that "Stairway to Heaven" sounded like someone singing while he made
popcorn. I don't recall loving it any the less for that.

After all, at age 14 you could ascend to guitar-god heaven just by leaping around the bedroom, riffing
your fingers raw on an old tennis racket, basking in the adulation of 20,000 fans out there beyond the
chest of drawers. To lose yourself in fantasy, in the raw, shocking noise -- that was catharsis enough.

On one immortal occasion, those racket-strangling sessions graduated to the level of true performance.
My friend Larry and I gathered close relatives together in our basement and serenaded them for two solid
hours, fighting to be heard above the records we sang along with.

My letter-perfect rendition of the Beatles' "All My Loving" brought tears to my grandma's eyes. Our P.A.
system was that same $20 clunker, operated behind the scenes by Craig, my dutiful younger brother. He
was also our lighting man, which is how the Mother of All Flashlights came to be dropped on my
cherished copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road moments after we took the stage.

Craig now works at a recording studio and makes more money than I do. But the point is, considerations
of professionalism and purity evaporated in the face of the sheer potency of sound. However sloppily
mediated, rock tapped something elemental in us. Even on a crummy car radio, it turned mild-mannered
folk into dashboard Keith Moons.

It can't have been much different for listeners of the first mass-market records. In the '20s, they had
absurd devices with huge styluses that scratched tunes from brittle vinyl and blew them through a speaker
twisted like an ear-trumpet. From what I remember of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, those technical
limitations didn't keep the jazz generation from dancing up a storm.

Revolutions sweep all before them, and the wave of advances in audio technology over the last decade or
two didn't bypass me entirely. But until two weeks ago, I'd clawed my way only so far up the
evolutionary ladder as to possess a glorified boom-box with a CD player hooked up alongside.

I was taking it slowly, you see, befitting a grad student who has to budget for Kraft Dinner as well as
more conspicuous consumption. First came the boom-box, with its digital tuner and primitive Dolby.
Then a good pair of headphones. Then the Boxing Day-sale Technics SL-PC505 CD multi-player: a sleek
machine that lets me change discs even when one's playing!

This was the decisive plunge. As many of you have probably discovered to your cost, sinking $300 into a
CD player is just the beginning. You then have to acquire a critical mass of listening material to go with
your new toy.

That means squandering birthday money from your grandmother on the Led Zeppelin CD box set. (Some
things don't change. The generous grandma is that hardy survivor of my basement serenade. And -- lo and
behold! -- there's "Stairway to Heaven," sweetly sneaking its way into the Zep box set, free forever of its
popcorn fusillade.)

After falling into CD's cool digital embrace, it was only a matter of time until a rare surplus in my bank
account coincided with a retailer's seductive payment plan. A paltry pledge of twelve hundred bucks, and
two more components, a Technics SA-GX350 amp and RS-TR333 double cassette-deck, landed on my
stereo rack. Both are black as blackest night. Their liquid crystal displays glow like radar screens.

Rounding out the package is a pair of Profiles bookshelf speakers about half a metre tall. When I was
growing up, speakers that size would have cardboard woofers, and a life expectancy of about two years
before the glue crumbled. (You'd keep blasting them anyway, of course.)

By comparison, these new speakers are as a Jaguar to my beat-up Toyota. For one thing, they don't make
distracting knocking noises every time I turn up the volume, though sometimes the neighbours do. And
they resonate. Yesterday I discovered a whole new low-frequency range in rap music. So did my
neighbours.

My personal great leap forward seems more like a natural progression. I don't get the urge to strum a
tennis racket much anymore. Today, the richness of sonic textures captivates me, coexisting comfortably
with rock's primal shriek.

And a richly-textured shriek is truly a thing of beauty.

Created by Adam Jones, 1998. No copyright claimed for non-commercial use if source is acknowledged and notified.adamj_jones@hotmail.comLast updated: 12 October 2000.